Microsoft's IE loses top browser spot to Google's Chrome

Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) last month lost the No. 1 spot to Google's Chrome, marking a major milestone not only in IE's 21-year lifespan, but a dramatic changing of the desktop browser guard.

According to U.S. analytics vendor Net Applications, IE and Edge -- which the firm tossed into a single bucket labeled "IE" -- fell 2 percentage points in April, the fifth straight month of a loss greater than a point, and the 16th of any size -- to end at 41.4% of the total global browser user share.

Meanwhile, Chrome climbed 2.6 percentage points to take a narrow lead with 41.7%.

Previously, Computerworld had forecast -- using long-term trends portrayed by Net Applications' data -- that Chrome would wrestle the No. 1 position from IE by the end of May.

Mozilla's Firefox also beat Computerworld's projection by dropping eight-tenths of a percentage point to fall below 10% -- 9.8%, to be exact -- earlier than anticipated.

Apple's Safari and Opera Software's Opera were flat or up slightly last month, ending April at 4.9% and 1.9%, respectively.

But the news was definitely the continued decline of IE and the concurrent rise of Chrome.

By forcing customers to upgrade to a newer version of IE -- a move Microsoft made in August 2014, when it told most customers to migrate to IE11 if they wanted to continue receiving security patches -- the Redmond, Wash. company triggered a disastrous decline in IE's user share. Staring at a requirement to change browsers, people instead rethought their choice, and then abandoned Microsoft's browsers for Chrome.

Since the mandate's announcement, IE has lost 17.1 percentage points of user share, representing a 29% decline from its August 2014 position. A contraction of that size in that short a period was unprecedented in browsers.

Net Applications was not the first to claim that Chrome is the dominant browser.

As far back as May 2012, Irish metrics company StatCounter -- which measures activity through tallies of web pages displayed by each browser, a number described as usage share -- contended that Chrome had surpassed IE to be the world's most-used browser. For April 2016, StatCounter pegged Chrome's share at 60.5%, IE + Edge at 15.5%.

Capriotti's argument has been made moot by Net Applications' April data.

Firefox's problems have been different: The Mozilla flagship's five-year slide was not linked to a specific action. Instead, the browser that once shook up the market -- it was the first to take on IE, and prompted a resumption of browser development by Microsoft -- has simply slipped into irrelevance. Firefox's April user share was almost identical to what it enjoyed in February 2006, just 16 months after its introduction, when IE controlled 85% of the browser market.

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